September 05, 2009
7. Wrap-Up Part 1: Rice Farmers and the Philippine Economy
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, as it may be! I am now back in the strange land of Minnesota. I haven’t put up a post in forever! Sorry. The events in that last post date way back to about July 15, so I haven’t even written about my entire second month. Terrible. The rest of this post will be one I started in late July but didn’t get to finish. The next post will be a far-too-undetailed tour of the major highlights from my last month on the other side of things. Anyway:
Lubao, Pampanga province: Rice Farms stopover
On the way back to Manila from Subic and Olongapo, one of the KPD-Central Luzon organizers and I stopped in the province of Pampanga for two days and a night. In order for me to better understand the plight of Filipino farmers we stayed with a rice farmer. He leads an organization in his community that is affiliated with the peasant farmer affiliate of KPD. Here’s why you probably wouldn’t want to be a peasant rice farmer in the Philippines:
1) Small peasant rice farmers – those working on plots typically smaller than 3 hectares and usually around 1 hectare or less – are very poor, typically living on no more than $2.50 a day. To add to the difficulty, that income is largely dependent on the weather. Yearly typhoons during the rainy season damage or destroy crops. In the months when there is no crop (usually between March and June), farmers must find other sources of income, such as day-labor construction.
2) Across the country, peasant farmers of all sorts must rent the land they farm, and their plots are tiny. This is a legacy of the Spanish colonial period, and after a few half-hearted attempts at land reform in the past 30 years, land is still owned by a small number of wealthy Filipinos. This means tenants must give a significant chunk of their harvests to the landowner. The value of the rent – paid in rice – is usually equal to about 50% of the farmers’ take home pay after a harvest (i.e., their earnings would be 50% higher if they owned their own land). Needless to say, rent is an enormous burden. Between high rental costs, high input costs, and technological limitations, small farmers are only able to rent between half a hectare and three hectares at the very maximum (while landlords own anywhere from 50 to thousands of hectares).
3) Aside from a small discount on seed they may get if they buy from the local government, they don’t receive any subsidies. This means they rarely own any equipment themselves (e.g., hand-tractors for tilling, threshers for harvesting, water buffalo or caribao(!) for plowing), and that the equipment they rent or share with their neighbors is ancient – both in age and technological advancement (caribao(!)). Because they possess or have access to such limited and ancient equipment, they also have to hire and pay people to help during planting and harvesting. Furthermore, farmers face huge, nearly paralyzing input costs, particularly in imported inorganic fertilizer and pesticides (which are a must if you want anyone to buy your rice) and gas and lubricant for hand-tractors. They also depend mostly on rainfall because they have little or no access to a very old irrigation canal. And finally, an absence of roads and motorized transportation gives farmers a tough time in getting their rice to the buyers.
4) Local rice mill cartels – comprised of the companies which buy the rice harvests from the farmers – collude to drive up seed prices during planting season and drive down rice prices during harvest season. Due to lack of financial resources, farmers are unable to transport their harvests to or bring home seed from more distant mills where prices might be fairer. If somehow they attempt to buy and sell elsewhere, the rice mill cartel can stop them by doing such absurd things as reserving all the rental trucks in the area. It actually happens. Basically, if you’re a farmer, you’re screwed.
Organizing
In case you have forgotten – as I have – I was there with KPD, which means there was some sort of organizing going on (wherever there is KPD there is community organizing!). As I mentioned a long time ago, the farmer with whom we were staying is the head of an organization of 20-some farmers from his community. The organization came into being because of a single, sacred object: a beat down, rusty old hand-tractor which was donated to them about fifteen years ago. A hand-tractor, it turns out, is invaluable for tilling and transporting seed and harvests. The members (membership requires a small one-time fee) have access to the tractor at a low, somewhat affordable rental rate. They coordinate so they can each use the tractor when they need it. If no one needs it – which isn’t often – they rent it to non-members. (After so many years of use, the tractor is finally falling apart. The farmers are getting quite desperate for a new one. I might start a fundraising effort to help them out, so if you are interested….)
With the help of KPD’s farmer organization, the organization also conducts other functions. They hold discussions on various local, national, and even international issues which affect them, and, when possible, they lobby all levels of government for any support they can get. Their ultimate goal is genuine agrarian reform, meaning national land reform (so farmers can own land), the provision of subsidies, and protection against international agreements like the Agreement on Agriculture in the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services which harm small farmers all across the Third/developing world (by restricting governments from protecting local farmers).
Bigger Picture
Instead of supporting small rice farmers like these and developing the agricultural sector to boost dmoestic production and quality of life, the Philippine government continues to neglect the sector and devote more spending for rice imports. Perhaps this would be more acceptable if there was other work for the farmers to go to – if the government was supporting a shift away from agriculture toward another sector like industry. Or if there was enough rice. But there are no such jobs and there is no such shift taking place (industry is totally undeveloped) and there definitely isn’t enough rice. In the truly exceptional case that a job does appear, it is usually in some awful foreign-owned place like the Hanjin shipyard. Or in a call center, if you’ve been fortunate enough to go to college and become a good English speaker (and if you're younger than 25 - in the service sector there is some serious age discrimination in hiring).
This mess of an economy helps to explain why there are 11 million working abroad and another 1 million leaving each year (total population is about 90 million Filipinos); why 20 million Filipinos engage in precarious/informal sector work like street-vending or peddling (about 70% of total employment, according to the Philippine Department of Labor and Employment); and why doctors go back to nursing school and teachers go back to domestic-helper certification schools so they can work overseas. Stuck between the incredible hardships of peasant farming and the inhumanity of exploitative factory work, most people are squeezed out onto the street selling food or onto a plane leaving their families behind.
As demonstrated by its primary focus on a de-facto labor-export economic policy, the Philippine government is more than happy to leave the economy just as it is: export-oriented (garments, electronic parts and semi-conductors, minerals and oil, fruit); dependent on imports (machinery and transport equipment, iron and steel, food, consumer goods) and foreign investment; supported by remittances (12% of GDP and the backbone of consumption, which accounts for 70% of GDP); and incapable of providing livelihoods and food for the majority of Filipinos. The governments of Japan,China, the US, the UK, Germany, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong (the top trading partners and sources of Philippine foreign direct investment) are probably happy that it stays that way, too. As are the governments of lots of other countries, probably. And of course the owners and executives of lots of corporations from all those countries, probably. And the people who own stock in those corporations that are public. And probably all the other people who are employed by those corporations. And all the people around the world who have cheap Filipino domestic helpers/servants. And probably lots of other people from all sorts of countries, who benefit in some way or another, whether they know it or not. Not fun to think about.
Pictures. FINALLY.
Caribao. This is after the harvest, in preparation for planting.
Hand-tractor. Also in preparation for planting. The rice stalks are knocked over/uprooted/killed, then the field will be flooded and they will decompose.
Might as well help with a couple handfuls - someone's got that whole patch behind me to transplant. (Initially, the seeds are scattered in one area, but after a few weeks the new stalks are moved to another area where they are replanted by hand, one-by-one, to have enough space to grow). That will definitely be a lot of aching backs.
Harvesting. The rice grains or palay are separated from the stalks. The farmer that rents this plot had to hire all those people to help out.
Getting the product to market.
One more post. Thanks for reading.
Posted by Isaac Jabola-Carolus at 05:27 PM | Comments (1)
